Rich Bradshaw's questions

I have a server that accepts HTTP POSTs from an 3rd Party, then returns either a 200 or 500.

The 3rd Party is not under my control, and sometimes sends very large POSTs, e.g. 40MB.

These POSTs cause my PHP code to run out of memory, which I can't catch, and so apache sends a 500.

The API retries that POST forever, and doesn't send new data, so this is a problem.

I've tried various things, but have ended up thinking that if I could have .htaccess just return a 200 and do nothing else, if the content_length was > X, then this would at least buy me time to restructure how this works.

So…

Is it possible to write a rule in .htaccess such that if content_length > X, it returns a 200?

I'm planning to back up multiple websites to Glacier at midnight each day.

My current system is to create a tar.gz of the whole of /var/www (i.e. all the sites), and to copy that to a different server.

I'm assuming I would use these backups if the whole server failed, though perhaps I'd occasionally want to retrieve individual files.

Should I continue in the same way (tar.gz of all per day in one Vault), or have different tar.gz per site in the same vault, or different tar.gz per site each in a vault per site?

I have two identical servers, one with IP address 1.1.1.1 and one with IP address 2.2.2.2.

They both run Ubuntu with Apache 2.4.

I have a domain name. It's A record is set to 1.1.1.1.

I want to be able to quickly change this so that without modifying the DNS, the site is served from 2.2.2.2.

Effectively I want server 1.1.1.1 to be able to say "pass through me, I'll proxy 2.2.2.2 to you seamlessly".

Is this possible/straightforward?

This would be a temporary measure. We can assume that 1.1.1.1 and 2.2.2.2 are permanently on, and have a good network connection between them.

I have an SSL cert valid for the www. and . subdomains on a domain. That's up and working great. All traffic on http redirects to https, and all bare domain traffic redirects to the www. version. In short, everything ends up on https://www. So far so good.

However, I also have a .com. That currently has an apache level redirect (can't change DNS currently)

At the moment going to the https://www.***.com address shows that the certificate isn't valid, which is of course correct – it's only for www and . on .co.uk.

Question

How do I get the https://www.***.com to redirect to https://www.***.co.uk without a valid SSL cert for the .com, and without changing the DNS?

Technical details

All domains point to same server. A vhost is set up for the ssl version and non ssl version, both with aliases for www and no www for the .co.uk and .com.

A rewrite rule like:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

pushes everything to https.

Simple permissions question.

I want the www user to have read write access to a subfolder in my home folder. Obviously, I want to be able to use it too!

I know I can execute:

sudo chown -R www:www /Users/myusername/subfolder

But I fear that that will mean that www owns it, rather than me. How do I make this work?